


Red

by virtueofvice



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Outdoor Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 03:11:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1924536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virtueofvice/pseuds/virtueofvice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boone struggles to remain faithful to Carla's memory, but all he can see is red.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red

He didn't recall quite when it had happened, the subtle shift in his mind that seemed so minute but changed everything. When they had met, her appearance had shocked him, cut through his apathy in a way that little else had since that night he'd walked into his room at Novac and found his wife gone, bloodstains on the floor and a scrap of crimson cloth caught in the doorjamb. 

The courier was otherwordly, there was no better word for it. Skin so white it glowed in the merciless desert sun, glistening with sweat in the heat of the day but never burning. And that hair - he'd hated it, at first; advised her more than once (with little expectation of complicity) to dye it over, make it darker, less obvious. Hair like that, gleaming bright ruby like fresh blood or the violent streak of a laser rifle, made her an easy target for anyone with a scope. 

"A sniper could take your head off from a mile away," he groused once. 

She smirked, tucking her flaming locks a little more firmly beneath her helmet, and retorted; "Then I suppose it's my good fortune that the best sniper in the Mojave is on my side and not theirs."

He pretended that the compliment meant nothing to him. But, as he'd said at Bitter Springs, when it was all over - it was no small thing to have someone like that looking out for him. No small thing to have somehow earned her respect. 

He had hated the color for the longest time. Crimson, vermillion, billowed in waves across his dreams. The color of the beret he'd worn at Bitter Springs. The bloodstains on his floor in Novac. The cloaks of Caesar's Legion. The sunburst of death at the long end of his scope - a single piercing crack, then red, then nothing. 

He clung to his image of Carla even as the truth of her memory faded - her black hair and olive skin, slightly slanted eyes, belly firm and rounded with his child. He remembered her sophistication and forgot her entitled airs, remembered her charm and forgot her ignorance. The dead are always more lovely to those left standing on the other side. He had sworn to himself that there was only one woman, could only ever be one woman. Carla had never asked him about his history, never demanded to know about the horrors of war and the shadows lurking behind his eyes. His sleepless nights were of no consequence to her - she could be sweet, and loving, but ever distant from his soul. She lacked the understanding borne of sleeping beside someone on the cold, hard desert ground, of walking miles in relentless heat beneath heavy armor and the weight of a rifle. She was a wife, and a good one in her way; but never a comrade, never a friend. Still he dreamed, fixing her idolized image in his mind during the long march, hoping to hold onto something real in the midst of all that was surreal. 

But still, in his dreams, there was only red. 

One night, she crouched by the fire patiently cooking their supper - only vegetables and fruits went into the stew pot, and the occasional treated Brahmin meat - she had an aversion to irradiated food and did her best to keep their diet healthy. Boone sat with his legs crossed on a low boulder, rifle in pieces on a scrap of cloth at his feet. Carefully, deliberately, he cleaned and polished each piece; readying the gun that had become his closest companion to take its place at his side again come the morning. She leaned forward, poking a stick into the embers to encourage the sluggish flame, and asked without looking at him, "Boone."

"Hmm."

Her tone was nonchalant; the stick stirred round and round, releasing sparks into the night sky like so many murderous fireflies. "What color was your wife's hair?" She knew, of course. She'd been in his pack enough times, rearranging their gear, digging for supplies, to have seen the faded old photograph of a pretty woman with hair black as a Nevada night.

"Red." He replied without thinking, then froze, hands tightening automatically on the cleaning cloth and displaced barrel in his hand as every vertebra in his spine went rigid. Then he exhaled slowly, forcing his muscled frame to relax as he set down the gun parts and retrieved a cigarette from the crumpled pack in his pocket. NCR snipers were discouraged from smoking, but many things had changed about Boone since his days as a soldier. "That was a dirty trick." He commented blandly, as if such an exchange occurred daily and was not unexpected. Leaning forward on his haunches, he lit his cigarette in the campfire before rocking back on his heels. "How long have you known?"

"Since Cottonwood Cove." She was referring, not to their first trip to the cove and the subsequent total eradication of the Legion troops there, but to a solitary mission. Her next visit occurred months later. She had disappeared two days before his birthday; though how she'd known he still had no idea. Leaving him in a clearing at the edge of the desert with express orders not to follow, she vanished off into the mountains with a light pack and only her favorite customized Cowboy Repeater on her back. He had begun to despair of her return, the hours of each passing day melting into the next, as he tended the tiny campsite and waited. In the afternoon of the third day, only an hour or so before the sun set on his birthday, he had begun to pack up camp in anticipation of tracking her down. Turning to hoist the pack, he saw her on the horizon. She trudged through the shimmering mirage of heat rising off the hardpacked earth, her image wavering and posture bent and exhausted. As she drew closer he saw that damnably bright hair was mussed and sweaty, she was covered in dust and grit and there was a cut high on her left cheekbone. But she was smiling triumphantly, and in her hands was a sniper rifle that looked as if it had resisted the elements with all the mystical veracity of Excalibur. 

"I couldn't miss your birthday." She informed him - by way of explanation, it bordered on the absurdly succinct. 

He took the rifle from her reverently, running his hands over the flawless stock, the reinforced barrel, looking through the scope at the distant ridges as they disappeared into purple twilight. Lowering the weapon, he turned to look at her, and she was gazing off into the distance; her eyes half-open in the evening breeze and a vague smile on her lips. She looked dead on her feet, but infinitely pleased with herself. A lock of hair fluttered in the wind like a proud banner, teasing at the angry cut on her cheek, and without thinking he reached out and tucked the crimson strands behind her ear. She flinched slightly, not in fear but in the wary surprise born of life in the Mojave, and turned her grey-eyed gaze to him.

"Do you like it?"

"Yes." His eyes met hers and for a moment he could not look away, fascinated by the exhaustion and the pride, the steel and fire in them. Then he remembered his guilt, his grief, and looked away. He did not touch her again, for many months; even when treating injuries he maintained a sense of clinical detachment, and kept his bedroll well away from hers. 

Until they were sitting around the campfire, about a day's travel from anywhere, and she asked him a question while the orange light of floating embers danced within her eyes. The Mojave itself was beautiful, and merciless; and he had expected that, within that violent masterpiece of natural resilience, nothing living could ever be called beautiful again. But here she was before him, beautiful in the way the Mojave was beautiful - distant, and unpredictable; unrestrained and deadly. No other woman would have ever given him a gun. No other woman would have ever realized how much it would mean to him to receive one. Especially one pried from the dead hands of a Legion assassin, as his had been. It was perfect, all the pieces fitting together in a way that few things did anymore. 

He turned his gaze to her, cigarette burned down almost to the joint of his fingers where he held it loosely, heat from its glowing coal warm on his callused skin. He took a final drag, grimacing at the taste, and cast it into the fire. Waste not. Her hair was unbound, she brushed it each evening to free it from the dust of travel when baths were not available. It gleamed in the firelight, seeming to shimmer and move like a living thing. "Why?" He queried. Boone was not a demonstrative man. They could have gone on as they had been forever, pretending that he was still wrapped wholly in the memory of his lost love; that their companionship was one of necessity and convenience rather than devotion. It would have been a lie, but it was a comfortable one. One that he could sleep with at night when the emptiness of the desert and all his ghosts howled at his back.

"You're a good soldier, Boone." She replied, leaning forward and lighting up a cigarette, then using a worn leather gauntlet to remove the simmering soup kettle from the fire. The beaten, dented metal lid went on top, to protect their dinner from other interested parties. The cigarette hung loose between her lips, ember glowing as she inhaled; plume of smoke obscuring her glittering eyes as she exhaled slowly through her nose. "These wastes are full of good soldiers. Strong men, brave men; who are willing to kill and die for their cause." 

He shifted uncomfortably, putting the rifle back together with barely audible clicks and setting it aside beneath the canvas flap of his pack. "And?"

She cocked her head at him, that little smile playing about her lips that had, on varying occasions, made him want to slap her silly - or throw her down on the dusty scorched earth and moan her name into warm flesh and secrets as the stars spiraled, obscure, above them. 

"Don't get it?" She took a long drag, dry cigarette burning down, down, down to her fingertips before she cast it away. "I'm not a cause, Boone. I don't stand for truth or justice. I'm not here to protect the innocent or right the wrongs; ever staunch, ever valiant. I'm just a girl with a gun, trying to make it through to another day and not fuck things up too badly in the meantime." She rose from her crouch, moving fluidly toward him, dry earth crunching beneath her boots as she sank down again. "For someone like you to be willing to kill for me; to die for me - well. That's a hell of a thing."

His own words came back to him, echoing in the scant spaces between one breath and another. She was very close to him now, he could smell the no-scent of the desert dust on her clothes, the aged and polished leather of her armor. And beneath it, her skin, smoky sweet like agave nectar lingering on the tongue. He exhaled slowly, feeling the heat from the fire prickling on his skin as it devoured a large piece of wood and roared to life. His hands tingled, fingers clenching and unclenching once, twice, before he reached for her and pulled her close. His fingertips, strong as a vise, closed around her upper arms and he spoke in a hoarse whisper.

"You don't want me at your back forever. Not me."

"Who else?" She snapped, and pressed her lips to his. 

Her kiss was like fire, as he'd always imagined it would be. His eyes slipped closed as he leaned back against the boulder, hands slipping from her arms to grip her narrow waist, pinning her hips down. She parted her thighs, straddled him, surprisingly feminine hands pulling the beret from his head and setting it aside without pulling her lips from his. Her tongue slipped between his lips, and as he opened his mouth in wordless concession to her, she nipped at his lower lip with even white teeth. He groaned, a wordless articulation pulled almost unwillingly from his throat; and his hands at her hips tightened. Fuck, it had been so long. She tasted of cigarettes and whiskey, with a touch of the hidden sweetness that he had long suspected but never dared imagine. Bringing his hands up to her shoulders, he untied the rawhide laces that held her thin armor in place, and peeled it away.

Her skin gleamed rosy in the firelight, her eyes shining, pupils dilated and hair mussed. Her lips were invitingly plump, and his hands, rock-steady on a rifle, shook as he laid her on the bedroll beneath him and pulled away her breeches and boots. No sooner had he divested her of worn leather and cloth, however, than she was up and in his lap again, working open his fly and baring his skin to the chill night air. Her fingers wrapped around his cock and his hips jerked up instinctively, eyes falling shut for the second time that night, the watcher made lax and at the mercy of her touch. Her thighs braced his hips, one hand splayed on his chest as she sank down onto him. He thrust up into her heat with a curse, hands clamping down hard on her hips, and they found their rhythm, melting into each other and dissolving into a murmured litany in the Mojave night. 

***

The following morning as she lay sleeping, he rose from the mess of bedrolls and clothing that they had collapsed in, unusually reliant on cover of darkness to keep them safe. In any other situation he would have been appalled by his own carelessness, but this morning Boone found himself merely bemused. He stirred the embers of the evening's fire and quietly set the pot on to reheat, then lit a cigarette and prowled a few paces away from the campsite to watch the sun come up. He had turned unerringly in the direction of Novac, though from this far out not even the dinosaur was visible, not even to his sniper's eyes. He finished the cigarette and crushed it under his boot, then returned to where the courier was sleeping, her hair splayed across her pack like spilt blood. 

Red. For so long he had loathed the color, it haunted his dreams and left him cold. But last night it had heated his blood in a way he'd no longer considered possible. Traveling with the courier was an exercise in uncertainty; he never knew from day to day where they would go or who they would be fighting. For once, that concept failed to trouble him. 

A glance at the pot informed him that it would still be some time before their shared breakfast was ready. Lowering himself to the bedroll beside her, he pulled her rear flush against him, rolling his hips forward and unable to stifle a low groan of appreciation at the contact. He felt half-crazed for her, pulse quick and skin burning to the touch though the sun had barely risen. 

The courier woke in his arms and tensed for half a second before she recalled who shared her makeshift bed. "Good morning, sniper." She teased gently, and with a languid stretch arched her spine and pressed her backside against him. 

"Morning, Red."


End file.
